marialachicahttp://www.marialachica.com
The Cheekiest of Chica'sSat, 18 Jul 2015 22:19:11 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1Nashvillehttp://www.marialachica.com/index.php/blogging/nashville/
http://www.marialachica.com/index.php/blogging/nashville/#commentsSat, 18 Jul 2015 22:08:40 +0000marialachicahttp://www.marialachica.com/?p=1101First it was Grey’s Anatomy, then Brothers & Sisters, and now Nashville… I am hooked and somehow in love with Nashville (the TV series, that is)

I like having a series that is just for me and I don’t have to share with Jon. There are already quite a few shows that we watch together, so it is handy to have something to watch if one night he’s geeking upstairs or goes out with his friends.

The problem is that I don’t have a very patient nature and I will want to watch two or three episodes in one go. That’s how I “consumed” 10 seasons of Grey’s in a few months and “devoured” all of Brothers and Sisters in just a few weeks. And now I find myself watching Nashville every time I’ve got 40 minutes to spare…

Nashville is great in so many ways, but what has surprised me the most is the quality of the music. Every song is so good by its own merits and some of them are really hypnotic. The actors are the singers and I would have never guessed they could sing so well!

I’m only halfway through season 2 and I still have another season to go. But for now these are my top three favourite songs:

]]>http://www.marialachica.com/index.php/blogging/nashville/feed/0This week in my newsfeed… not.http://www.marialachica.com/index.php/blogging/this-week-in-my-newsfeed-not/
http://www.marialachica.com/index.php/blogging/this-week-in-my-newsfeed-not/#commentsTue, 07 Jul 2015 09:11:15 +0000marialachicahttp://www.marialachica.com/?p=1098A few weeks back I had this brilliant idea, where I would take screenshots of stuff happening in my Facebook newsfeed and then I would comment them here. You see, I am painfully aware of how abandoned this blog has been in the last few months and I wanted to create something easy for me to keep up with.

So I would comment on things that caught my eye, pieces of news, articles shared or even stuff from groups. Things that I wouldn’t necessarily want to talk about on Facebook, but I still had to leave my two pence somewhere. And what better place than here?

However, due to a couple of reasons that I am not going to explain here, two weeks ago I decided to deactivate my Facebook account. And trust me, I have never felt so liberated in my life. I won’t lie, the first few days were hard. My finger kept hovering over the Facebook icon in my iPhone, and I had a couple of urges to come back. However, I persevered and now it’s been two weeks without this addiction.

Because I have no shame in admitting that I was addicted to it. All day every day I was connected and checking it. Unfortunately, in the last few weeks I had become more and more tired of its uselessness and “fakeness”. Yes, it’s true that I miss certain online contact with certain people, and I know I may be missing on a lot from people that I care about, but the freedom from all the crap and addiction makes it all so much better.

I will probably come back some day soon, but I will make a point of limiting my access and keeping things much more personal, by deleting people that don’t offer anything to me or people that are not really my friends. Silly how one can be pressured into accepting friends requests from people that you don’t really know.

So maybe then, when I go back, I will start my “This week in my newsfeed” series on the blog.

Untill then, be happy.

]]>http://www.marialachica.com/index.php/blogging/this-week-in-my-newsfeed-not/feed/3Teen crushhttp://www.marialachica.com/index.php/blogging/teen_crush/
http://www.marialachica.com/index.php/blogging/teen_crush/#commentsTue, 07 Oct 2014 19:44:35 +0000marialachicahttp://www.marialachica.com/?p=1093Between the ages of 13 and 15 I had my first crush. My first adolescent love. It was platonic, since he was never interested in me, but I loved him like only a teenage girl can love a teenage boy.

He was two years older than me but he had a sister of my age. We were all part of the same “gang” and went everywhere together. We were very good friends, and despite the fact that he knew that I was crazy about him, that never affected our friendship.

His father moved jobs or something like that and the whole family moved to a different town. That, at the age of 15, is like dying. Well, it was for me. I remember crying and crying and crying. Desperately. Thinking that my life would never be the same, I would never fall in love again, etc. (oh my, I’m not looking forward to my daughter’s teenage years!)

Well, the thing is that I have always kept a very warm memory of him. At the end of the day he was the base of the type of guy that I would look for in the following years. I wanted… no, hang on… I needed a guy who would look like him, behave like him, be him. I can’t believe it’s been 20 years, and in this time my memory of him has not changed much. In my head, he is still 16 or 17 years old, wears shorts and vans shoes, skates and writes raps with his best friend Ivan.

There’s this scene in Friends when David (scientist guy) returns from Minsk and sees Phoebe, and he says something along the lines of “you know when you haven’t seen someone in a while and you build them up in your head, and you think nobody is that good looking, but you are”. Well, the opposite just happened to me.

I confess that I have googled his name in the hope to find out a bit about him a couple of times before, but I have been quite unsuccessful in the past. He has got quite an unusual name, so any results on the search are always him. But I don’t find much! I was able to learn that he has collaborated with other people on projects related to learning English as a second language, but not much more.

However, this last time I was a bit more fortunate. I decided to just google his surnames without the first name, and the results found the facebook page of one of his sisters. Luckily for me, she had a family pic as cover photo, and finally, 20 years later, there he was.

And. What. A. Shock.

The years have not been kind to him. Despite the photo being from a family event where everyone looked happy, he looked tired, worn, bored even! Now I kind of regret having looked for him. I think I should have kept the image of that good looking and funny skater that I fell in love with when I was 13 years old.

I have no doubt that he is happy, if I remember correctly he was the kind of guy with a positive outlook on life. Even when he had to move towns and leave all his friends behind, he was super strong and pragmatic about it. But no doubt he is not the same person that I fell in love with. Like I am not the same person that I was 20 years ago. But yeah, he looks so miserable in that photo…

A very important lesson has been learnt. Leave the past in the past.

]]>http://www.marialachica.com/index.php/blogging/teen_crush/feed/1I have a dreamhttp://www.marialachica.com/index.php/blogging/i-have-a-dream/
http://www.marialachica.com/index.php/blogging/i-have-a-dream/#commentsFri, 05 Sep 2014 20:03:54 +0000marialachicahttp://www.marialachica.com/?p=1089Hollywood films have a lot to answer for. They have been bombarding us with the image of the perfect happy family for so long, that a simple look to our plain and regular lot makes us feel disappointed.

Still, I think it can be done, especially at crucial times like Christmas.

And I have a dream.

My dream consist of a big living room / dining room, with a beautifully decorated Christmas tree, surrounded by perfectly wrapped presents and other gorgeous decorations. The house smells of cinnamon and cleanliness. Everybody is dressed up but without looking over the top. The children are running around and playing nicely. Everybody is mingling and having politics-and-religious-free conversations. The food, which looks straight out of an M&S advert, is served right on time, nothing is burnt, or undercooked, and everybody loves everything. There aren’t any fussy or picky eaters and even the traditional Christmas pudding (which I don’t personally like) is a success. After the meal more merriment, with singing and a bit of entertainment from the kids, who have been rehearsing a little play for the last couple of weeks. We open presents, more oh!s and ah!s, more easy flowing conversation. A few anecdotes from the elders of the family, the same anecdotes that we have heard again and again before, but make us laugh every time. Everybody chips in with the tidying up and then they all leave without much fuss, leaving me time to sit down by the fireplace with a glass of Baileys in my hand, looking out of the window to the freshly laid snow and relive the best moments of the day.

That is my white Christmas dream. I’ll let you all know if it comes true one day

]]>http://www.marialachica.com/index.php/blogging/i-have-a-dream/feed/0Smells of the pasthttp://www.marialachica.com/index.php/blogging/smells-of-the-past/
http://www.marialachica.com/index.php/blogging/smells-of-the-past/#commentsFri, 01 Aug 2014 10:29:18 +0000marialachicahttp://www.marialachica.com/?p=1086One of the things that I remember the most about my first visit to the UK, when I was 15 years old, is the smells.

My host house had a certain smell, definitely not something I had smelt before in Spain. It wasn’t unpleasant, it was just different. My room had this particular smell, so did the living room and the dining room. I remember coming down for breakfast the first day and sitting down at the dining table and looking around me, taking everything in, and trying to figure out what the smell was.

I then went to the school were my course was taking place. And this place had its own particular smell too! The classes, the bar, the restaurant. It was all so different. I knew I was in a different country and I expected to find differences. It just didn’t occur to me that even the smells would be so particular.

This didn’t bother me, so I stopped paying attention. It just stayed in the back of my mind until I returned the following summer. I had had a great experience the first time round with my host family, so I requested to stay with them the following year too.

When I got there, the second time, and I put my first foot in the house, the smell abruptly hit me in the face. Suddenly it was like going home, the familiarity of the smell simply made me happy.

I have never been able to discribe the smell, although I have come across it several times during my travels in the UK. In the back of my mind I have always thought that it’s a mixture of old carpet, cooking butter and whatever product the use for cleaning. But I have also smelt it (or something very similar) in places with new carpets, or kitchens where I know for sure that butter isn’t used for cooking. So I honestly don’t know what it is.

If I am lucky enough to smell it, even if it’s just once a year, the smell transports me to that first summer in Kent, where I discovered this country that I love so much and where my passion for everything anglo started.